Topic > IPO

As VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell pointed out yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg managed to strike a deal with some key investors and friends that gives him 57 percent of the shareholder voting power. For a public company, it’s an almost unheard of concentration of authority, a troubling sign for those who focus on shareholder rights.

Mark Zuckerberg controls a majority of Facebook’s voting rights, and will continue to enjoy that control after it goes public, according to an unusual arrangement he struck with some key investors and colleagues among Facebook’s shareholders.

Facebook’s core values include a powerful, results-oriented, anti-theoretical philosophy called “The Hacker Way,” according to founder Mark Zuckerberg.
“The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration,” Zuckerberg writes. “Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.”

With Facebook’s just-released S-1 filing, we’re getting a better picture of how the company is competing in the mobile sphere. We already knew the company had more than 800 million registered members, and now we know it had more than 425 million monthly active mobile users in December 2011, a stunning accomplishment.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg owns 28.2 percent of the company, according to Facebook’s just-released IPO S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Facebook’s initial public offering is one of the most hyped technology events of the year, and the company is expected to debut on the stock market in May. Its stock ticker symbol will be “FB.” The company has not yet named a starting price has yet been named, but Facebook said in the filing that it expects to raise at least $5 billion in the IPO.

Social network king Facebook will likely file its first papers with regulators on Wednesday morning for a $5 billion initial public offering, “sources close to the deal” have told Reuters subsidiary IFR.

Insurance software company Guidewire will begin trading publicly on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) tomorrow. It has raised $115 million in the initial public offering by selling 8.85 million shares at $13 apiece. That’s well above the 7.5 million shares at $10 to $12 that the company had planned.

From delayed IPOs to buyouts and layoffs, 2011 proved to be a volatile year for daily deals companies. In the past 12 months, the industry was defined and legitimized, but had just as many mistakes as successes.

Zynga’s stock sank 5 percent yesterday, from $10 to $9.50, on its first day of trading. Some investors might feel like the stock will bounce back on Monday or in the weeks ahead. But at least one analyst is staying bearish.

Angry Birds, the two year-old blockbuster game and burgeoning franchise, has propelled its Finnish-maker Rovio to super-stardom. Now, the company is mulling the idea of joining the ranks of public companies — in Hong Kong.

Daily deals site LivingSocial has closed a monster $176 million round of financing, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission today. VentureBeat has learned that the $176 million is the first tranche of $400 million the company hopes to raise over the next weeks and months to finance continued operations and expansion.

When credible reports about Zynga’s upcoming IPO filing started flying this July, expectations for the social gaming giant’s value were running $15 billion to $20 billion. Now, with Zynga detailing the offering ahead of trading set to start December 15th, the actual offering price could value the company from $5.9 billion to $6.99 billion, or $7.6 billion to $8.9 billion including employee stock options.

Zynga’s tens of millions of regular players and burgeoning revenues have many investors excited about its fast approaching Initial Public Offering, but Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick is definitely not one of them.